Play Makes Us Human

Have you ever noticed how we, as a society,
use agricultural metaphors to talk about
parenting and education? We speak
of raising children, just as we speak of
raising tomatoes or chickens. We speak
of training children, just as we speak of
training horses. Our manner of talking and thinking about
parenting suggests that we own our children, much like we
might own domesticated plants and livestock, and that we
control how they grow and behave. We train horses to do
the tasks that we want them to do, and we train—or try to
train—children to do the tasks that we think will be necessary
for their future success. We do that whether or not the
horse or child wants such training. Training requires suppression
of the trainee’s will, and hence of play. The agricultural
approach to parenting is, therefore, not a playful one.

Our society’s concepts of raising and training children
assume a dominant/submissive relationship between
parent and child. The parent—or teacher or other parent
substitute—is in charge and is responsible for the child’s
actions. The child’s primary duty, at least in theory, is to obey.
This approach to parenting seems so natural to us that it may
be hard to imagine an alternative. Yet, in the context of our
long history as a species, it is new. It came with agriculture,
which first appeared about 10,000 years ago. Before that,
we were all hunter-gatherers and we had no agricultural
metaphors to guide our parenting practices.

In my series of essays, “Play Makes Us Human,” I have
described the social values and practices of hunter-gatherer
societies. My thesis has been that an expansion of the primate
play drive in our species enabled our ancestors to adopt a far
more social and cooperative style of life than that manifested
by other primates. Hunter-gatherers seem to use play and
humor more or less deliberately to suppress tendencies
toward dominance and to foster the sense of personal freedom
and equality that was essential to their livelihood.

To give you a sense of hunter-gatherers’ parenting philosophy,
here is a sample of quotations from anthropologists
and others who have lived in various hunter-gatherer societies
and observed them closely:

“Hunter-gatherers do not give orders to their children;
for example, no adult announces bedtime. At night,
children remain around adults until they feel tired
and fall asleep.... Parakana adults do not interfere with
their children’s lives. They never beat, scold, or behave aggressively with them, physically or verbally, nor do
they offer praise or keep track of their development.”
—Yumi Gosso et al., “Play in Hunter-Gatherer Societies”

“The idea that this is ‘my child’ or ‘your child’ does not
exist [among the Yequana, of South America]. Deciding
what another person should do, no matter what his age,
is outside the Yequana vocabulary of behaviors. There is
great interest in what everyone does, but no impulse to
influence—let alone coerce—anyone. The child’s will is
his motive force.” —Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept

“Aborigine children are indulged to an extreme degree,
and sometimes continue to suckle until they are 4 or
5 years old. Physical punishment for a child is almost
unheard of.” —Richard A. Gould, Yiwara: Foragers of the
Australian Desert

“Infants and young children [among Inuit huntergatherers
of the Hudson Bay area] are allowed to explore
their environments to the limits of their physical capabilities
and with minimal interference from adults. Thus
if a child picks up a hazardous object, parents generally
leave it to explore the dangers on its own. The child is
presumed to know what it is doing.” —Lee Guemple,
“Teaching Social Relations to Inuit Children”

“Ju/’hoansi children [of Africa] very rarely cried, probably
because they had little to cry about. No child was
ever yelled at or slapped or physically punished, and
few were even scolded. Most never heard a discouraging
word until they were approaching adolescence, and
even then the reprimand, if it really was a reprimand,
was delivered in a soft voice.” —Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Old Way

You might think that such indulgence would lead to spoiled,
demanding children, who would grow up to be spoiled,
demanding adults. But according to the anthropologists
who lived among them, nothing could be further from the
truth. Here is what Thomas has to say about that: “We are
sometimes told that children who are treated so kindly
become spoiled, but this is because those who hold that
opinion have no idea how successful such measures can
be. Free from frustration or anxiety, sunny and cooperative,
the children were every parent’s dream. No culture can ever
have raised better, more intelligent, more likable, more
confident children.”

Based on my reading of anthropologists’ writings about
many hunter-gatherer cultures, I would characterize
hunter-gatherer parenting in the following way:

1. Hunter-gatherers love their children as much as we love
ours. They rejoice at births, grieve at children’s deaths, and
enjoy their children as do we.

2. Hunter-gatherers protect young children from serious
dangers, but are not overprotective. Hunter-gatherers
recognize that they must arrange their environment in
certain ways to protect infants and very young children.
For example, those who hunt with poisoned arrows
store the arrows high up, out of young children’s reach.
Concerning less serious dangers, however, hunter-gatherers
believe it is best to let young children explore as they wish
rather than restrict their exploration. For example, it is not
uncommon to see toddlers poking sticks into the campfire
or playing with sharp knives. Hunter-gatherers’ experience
is that toddlers rarely hurt themselves in these activities
and that such risk is outweighed by the advantage of
learning, early on, how to handle such objects. The adults
believe, further, that by the time children begin to prefer
the company of other children to that of adults (at about
four years old), they have enough common sense to make
their own decisions about what is safe or unsafe. Children
of that age and older play in age-mixed groups, often some
distance from adults.

3. Hunter-gatherers trust their
children. Anthropologists
commonly use the term
indulgence to characterize
the hunter-gatherer style of
parenting, but I think the more
fundamental concept here is
trust. Parents indulge their
children’s desires because they
trust children’s instincts and
judgments. They believe that
children know best what they
need and when they need it,
so there are no or few battles
of will between adults and
children. If an infant cries or
shows even a lesser sign of distress,
any adult or older child
nearby responds immediately
to see what is the matter and to help solve the problem. The
assumption is that the infant would not communicate a need
for help unless it needed help.

Hunter-gatherers believe that the instinctive drives of
children to explore are balanced by instinctive fears and by
knowledge of their own abilities and limitations, which lead
them to temper their explorations with appropriate caution.
Four-year-olds will not, on their own, wander into unfamiliar
territory without the company of an older child or an adult.
Children of any age will not try to leap chasms that they are
physically unable to leap. Children are constantly taking risks
to expand the limits of what they can do, but the risks are
small. Children are designed by nature (today we would say
by natural selection) to do all this, so they will learn how to
cope with serious dangers when they occur.

Concerning education, hunter-gatherers trust that
children and adolescents will figure out what they need to
learn and will learn it through their own drives to observe,
explore, and play with all relevant aspects of their environment.
They trust, further, that when young people are
ready to start contributing in meaningful ways to the
band’s economy, they will do so gladly, without any need
for coercion or coaxing.

Such trust, I think, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
People who are trusted from the very beginning usually
become trustworthy. People treated in this way do not
grow up to see life as a matter of trying to overpower,
outsmart, or in other ways manipulate others. Rather,
they grow up viewing life in terms of friendships—
that is, in terms of people willingly and joyfully helping
each other to satisfy their needs and desires. That is the
playful approach to life—the approach that brings out
the best aspects of our humanity.

Play, as I have said repeatedly, requires individual
freedom. Play is no longer play when one person attempts
to dominate another and dictate what he or she does. If life
is a grand game, then each player must be free to make his
or her own moves, while still abiding by the general rules of
the game—in this case by the larger rules of society, which
apply to everyone. To interfere with the players’ abilities to
make choices is to destroy the game for them. Social interaction,
learning, productive work, and religious practices become
burdensome toil rather than joyful play when they are
enforced and controlled by others. By refraining from using
their greater physical strength or mental prowess to control
children’s (or anyone else’s) behavior, hunter-gatherer adults
refrain from destroying the sense of play in their children
and in themselves.

Play requires a sense of equality, and hunter-gatherers
are remarkably able to retain that sense even in their
interactions with young children. Young children are clearly
not as strong, skilled, or knowledgeable about the world as
are older children or adults, but their needs and desires are
equally legitimate, and nobody knows what a child needs
or desires better than the child himself or herself. Huntergatherers
seem to understand these truths better than do
most people in our society today.

Why did the approach to parenting change with the advent
of agriculture? It wasn’t just that new metaphors became
available. Rather, the goal of parenting changed—from that
of fostering the child’s will to that of suppressing the child’s
will—because the perceived needs of society changed.